Medinet Habu, Volume V. The Temple Proper, Part I: The Portico, the Treasury, and Chapels Adjoining the First Hypostyle Hall with Marginal Material from the Forecourts

By the Epigraphic Survey

The four preceding volumes of the series cover almost completely the scenes and inscriptions on the exterior walls of the Great Temple of Ramses III and on the interior walls of the open First and Second Courts. However, a considerable amount of peripheral material in the First and Second Courts not pertaining to the historical records, the temple calendar, and the festival scenes, which are the themes of those volumes, were for the most part not obtruded into the relative coherence of their plates. The time has now come to proceed not on the basis of thematically cohesive bodies of scenes and inscriptions but from one wall to the contiguous one, from one room to the next, in the absence of any other criterion of order. This being the situation, it has seemed wise to catch up marginal materials from the pylons and forecourts and to publish them in this and the next volume in as orderly a manner as possible. Consequently the present volume contains as a nucleus a solid body of reliefs from the fore part of the temple proper, as the roofed portion of the temple has been called, that is, from the Portico, the walls of the First Hypostyle Hall, the Treasury (Rooms 9-13), and chapels along the south (Room 14), and north (Rooms 1-3) sides of the First Hypostyle Hall. But, in addition, it contains a considerable body of marginal inscriptions, by no means always of minor significance, from the First and Second Courts. There are, for example, the lines of inscription running the length of walls above and below the major scenes, on architraves and abaci, on the sides of pilasters and Osiride columns, and scenes framing doorways and on their thicknesses.